Savarkar Read online

  ‘Vikram Sampath has done extraordinary research into Savarkar’s life and history. This book covers Savarkar’s life from his childhood until his release from jail, and formulation of the Hindutva thesis. Here, Vikram has placed in front of the Indian audience a neutral and objective picture of who he was, what his writings were, and what he did for India’s freedom. We wait in anticipation for the sequel, which will provide us with more details of his life after release from prison and events thereafter.

  ‘With this effort, Vikram has set an example of how New India’s scholars and historians can crack through the many manipulations and falsehoods behind the politically convenient “accepted construct” of India’s recent history and unearth the inspiring stories of our freedom movement’s many heroes who are deliberately ignored and oft-maligned. The true facts and deeds of patriots and freedom fighters like Savarkar must be made available to all Indians so that we can evaluate and decide for ourselves their impact on our shared history.

  ‘Vikram has done well to independently research, publish hitherto unpublished material and explain Savarkar’s life. It is up to the reader to make an objective assessment of Savarkar’s impact on India and our freedom. History is only as useful as what we can make of it. I hope this book contributes to the formation of your understanding of India’s unsung heroes’

  —T.V. Mohandas Pai , chairman, Manipal Global Education

  ‘Missing from the monochromatic rendition of the freedom struggle in school history textbooks for long, Savarkar remained “a pleasant addiction” in the author’s curious mind. The British called him “a dangerous, seditious force” but the Nehruvian-era historiography labelled him a cowardly traitor. The author found in the much-maligned historian’s enigma “a poet’s heart and a revolutionary’s brain” and a bundle of delightful contradictions. Savarkar even left a message for his future biographers, urging them to write without “inhibitions and fears”. Vikram Sampath’s is neither an apology for Savarkar, nor an effort to correct historical wrongs. It is a laborious, painstaking and substantive research from archival documents in India and the United Kingdom’

  —Shekhar Gupta , editor-in-chief, The Print

  ‘Vinayak Damodar Savarkar has finally got a twenty-first-century biography he deserves. It is probably the first of several, for the man—revolutionary, activist, reformer, intellectual—is vastly influential and relevant to any study of contemporary Indian society. The “intellectual fountainhead” of political Hinduism, Savarkar’s slim tract Hindutva (1923) anticipated many of the ambitions, anxieties and urges of today’s India. It has also given its author a salience that was ironically denied to him in his lifetime. Savarkar himself would have smiled wryly at this. He once remarked, as Vikram Sampath quotes him, “time would be the best arbiter of a man’s destiny”. Time and history have generously vindicated Savarkar.

  ‘Savarkar lived a rich life—a radical, “veer” freedom fighter; the subject of an international human rights and wrongful detention court battle in which his legal case was argued by, among others, a grandson of Karl Marx; author of a riveting biography of the uprising of 1857; a writer and poet of rare sensitivity in his native Marathi; a prime product of the firm and compelling intellectual and cultural narratives of Poona and especially of its Brahmin community, among modern India’s early educated elites. Unfortunately, his final years and succeeding decades after his death in 1966 saw him being examined substantially through the prism of immediate party politics and ideological prejudices—rather than as a legatee of the Maratha renaissance, a product of his age, and an autonomous and independent political thinker, with a gift for trenchant interventions.

  ‘In the India of 2019, there is more acceptance of Savarkar’s ideas. Sometimes this is without explicit recognition that the ideas that have been so embraced are actually ideas he advocated, often alone and isolated, close to a century ago. Consequently, there is a greater interest in Savarkar, and in what he represented and why he did so. Vikram Sampath’s book seeks to fill many of those gaps. It is a welcome addition to our public discourse’

  —Ashok Malik , former press secretary to the President of India, political analyst and commentator

  ‘Savarkar has long been a subject of abuse and adulation, both based on an incomplete understanding of his life and ideas. Vikram Sampath has written the finest biography. He has researched his subject in incredible depth and breadth, tracked down documents and memories long forgotten. This will restore the right balance to the story of one of the revolutionaries of modern India’

  —Meghnad Desai , eminent author and columnist, professor emeritus, London School of Economics

  Dedicated to the everlasting memory of my beloved Amma,

  my best friend, guide, philosopher, confidante and mother, all rolled into one;

  for whom I did/do everything that I did/do

  Prologue

  T he year was 2004. Newspapers and television channels in India were agog with a controversy that had erupted in distant Port Blair. The previous Government of India headed by Atal Bihari Vajpayee had decided to honour the memory of a freedom fighter, who had been incarcerated at the infamous Cellular Jail in Port Blair, with a plaque carrying his name and quotation. The Indian Oil Foundation had set up this memorial. It was a well-known secret among government and media circles that the assiduous efforts of Ram Naik, the then petroleum minister in the Vajpayee cabinet, were behind the much-belated recognition to the departed soul. With the general elections of 2004, the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) led by the Indian National Congress (INC) ousted Vajpayee’s government. In a swift move, within just a few months of coming to power, the new government and its petroleum minister Mani Shankar Aiyar got the plaque removed. Aiyar also went on to make several disparaging comments about the freedom fighter, justifying the move to displace the memorial. Both Houses of Indian Parliament were rocked by the controversy, with the erstwhile ruling party and now the principal Opposition party, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), and its Maharashtra ally Shiv Sena demanding a restoration of the plaque and an apology from the minister. This did not come and the Opposition was told in no uncertain terms that the UPA government had no intention of revoking this decision.

  This was perhaps the first time that my interest in the freedom fighter who was at the centre of this unseemly controversy, Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, was stoked. I had of course heard his name in passing, though it was conspicuously absent from all our history textbooks at school. Having studied in schools following the CBSE (Central Board of Secondary Education) syllabus, it certainly seemed to me that successive Central governments in India did not wish young people of the country to know anything about this man.

  Since a forbidden fruit has always been an attractive proposition from the time of Adam and Eve, over the next couple of years, Savarkar remained a pleasant addiction to my curious mind. At the same time I was getting more conscious of the manner in which his name gets entangled in every current political dogfight in India’s polarized polity. How did a man who died way back in 1966 manage to evoke such strong passions in the current generation? I wondered. And thus began my personal journey of discovering the life of the much-maligned Savarkar.

  As the intellectual fountainhead of the ideology of Hindutva, Savarkar is undoubtedly one of the most contentious political thinkers and leaders of the twentieth century. Accounts of his long and stormy life have oscillated from glorifying hagiographies to reproachful demonization. The truth, as always, lies somewhere in between and has unfortunately never been told to the people of this country.

  I was to slowly discover that Savarkar was a bundle of contradictions and a historian’s enigma. He simultaneously means many things to many people. An alleged atheist and a staunch rationalist who strongly opposed orthodox Hindu beliefs and the caste system and dismissed cow worship as mere superstition, Savarkar was also the most vocal political voice for the Hindu community through the entire course of the Indian freedom struggle. He and
his ideology stood as one of the strongest and most virulent opponents of the Indian National Congress in general and of Mahatma Gandhi and his philosophy of pacifism and non-violence in particular. A feted revolutionary who created an intellectual corpus of literature that inspired the revolutionary movement in India for decades, Savarkar was also a passionate and sensitive poet, a prolific writer and playwright, and a fiery orator. It is rare to find a combination of a poet’s heart and a revolutionary’s brain in a single man. The social reformer in him strove to dismantle the scourges of untouchability and caste hierarchies, and advocated a unification of Hindu society.

  Savarkar and his views could not have been more relevant to Indian politics and society than now, in 2019, with the Indian ‘right’ being in political ascendancy. With electoral politics and valuable judicial time being consumed by meaningless rhetoric around Savarkar and subsequent defamation cases that follow, it almost becomes a historian’s burden and duty to lay the facts bare for every discerning reader to judge where the truth lies. This biography attempts to do precisely that over two volumes.

  In 2014, India voted resoundingly for a stable government with a majority in the Lower House and which was free from all influence of the once powerful Indian National Congress. With this reversal of political fortunes, there has been a renewed interest in revisiting the lives of several national leaders who had hitherto not received their due in the course of the monochromatic narrative of the freedom struggle that has been popularized by the regimes post-Independence. Today, scholars are unearthing new information about leaders such as Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose, Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, Bhagat Singh and other revolutionaries, Lal Bahadur Shastri, Deendayal Upadhyaya and Shyama Prasad Mookerji, thereby looking at the multiple historiographical prisms through which one can view modern Indian historical discourse.

  But Savarkar has somehow been left out of this reassessment. While his ardent followers and biographers have extolled his greatness, his critics have slammed him as a cowardly traitor, murderer and a communal bigot. Savarkar, his contributions, his political philosophy and his legacy need to be re-examined and reassessed both by the yardstick of historical facts and documents that stare us in the face, and also through his own copious writings, which sadly have not reached mainstream scholarship as they have been largely in Marathi. This biographical series does just that.

  The ubiquitous word in contemporary Indian discourse is ‘Hindutva’. Commentators and politicians use the term in a broad sweep, seldom caring for the subtle historical nuances that underlie it. The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and Savarkar had differences of opinions on matters of Hindutva. Gandhi’s assassin Nathuram Godse in his confessional statement that was banned for decades mentions his disillusionment with what he describes as Savarkar’s ‘pacifist’ version of Hindutva. These facts demonstrate that there have been many versions of this term during its long and chequered history, since the time Savarkar pioneered its popularization in 1923.

  An assessment of the political philosophy of Savarkar and his Hindutva is essential to understand the situation that India finds itself in, in 2019, grappling with quite the same issues and contentions that he had been writing or warning about. At the same time, his flaws and follies need to be assessed in conjunction with his vision and philosophy, since he was undoubtedly one of the most critically influential political thinkers of his time. After all, as American historian John Noble Wilford states: ‘All works of history are interim reports. What people did in the past is not preserved in amber . . . immutable through the ages. Each generation looks back and drawing from its own experience, presumes to find patterns that illuminate both past and present.’

  Being a prolific writer, Savarkar wrote extensively about his own life. While information of his early life, replete with rich details, is extant in his memoirs, he has chosen to black out several time spans in his long, tempestuous life. It has thus been an incomplete autobiography. It trails away, even as he got caught in the whirlwind of political campaign in the run-up to freedom and later the trials related to Gandhi’s assassination where he was presented as a co-accused. Towards the end of his life, he had willed his secretary Balarao Savarkar to make use of the corpus of available documents about his own life, newspapers, diary notes and articles to chronicle milestones of his life. Balarao compiled these in volumes in Marathi titled Ratnagiri Parv , Hindu Mahasabha Parv and Akhanda Hindustan Ladha Parv . They cover the period from 1924 till his death in 1966 in extensive detail.

  Towards the end of 1926, the first English biography of Savarkar titled The Life of Barrister Savarkar was published in Madras under a curious pen name ‘Chitragupta’. In Hindu mythology, Chitragupta is the accountant of Yama, the God of Death, who keeps a meticulous debit and credit account of every soul’s sins and virtues. There have been various allusions about who the author is—from Congress leader C. Rajagopalachari, the revolutionary V.V.S. Aiyar to Savarkar himself writing under a pseudonym. The identity of the author continues to remain a mystery. The book chronicles the stormy years that he spent in London till he was arrested and sent back to India.

  Thereafter, Sadashiv Rajaram Ranade penned a brief biography in Marathi that was sold out within a fortnight of its release. In 1943, when Savarkar turned sixty, Shivarampant Karandikar wrote an elaborate biography that ran into nearly 600 pages. He referenced numerous newspaper articles, personal correspondences, memoirs, diaries and accounts of people close to Savarkar. Given its explosive content, the British government promptly ordered its ban. The proscription stayed on till 1947. But even after Independence, given the widespread negative perception that was spread about Savarkar in the aftermath of Gandhi’s murder, people preferred to stay away from him or with anything associated with him due to fear of reprisal from the government of independent India.

  Legends abound about how several eminent people lost their jobs, livelihood and reputation for demonstrating the least of associations with him. It is said that Karandikar was so frustrated that he wanted to burn all remaining copies of the book. It was left to eminent Marathi writer and historian Balwant Moreshwar Purandhare (popularly known as Babasaheb Purandhare) to convince Karandikar against this. Purandhare even volunteered to assist in selling the copies canvassing from door to door. 1

  By the end of the 1950s, the Government of Bombay released some secret papers from its archives related to the revolutionary body that Savarkar had founded, Abhinav Bharat. Like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, other aspects of the revolutionary period of Savarkar’s life and stormy contemporary events began falling in place. Accounts by R.K. Patwardhan (Nashikache Dashakatil Shatkrutya ) and Mukund Sonpatki (Daryapar) were published. D.N. Gokhale’s chronicle of Savarkar’s elder brother, Ganesh Damodar or Babarao, brought to light further details of the trials and tribulations faced by the brothers. Memoirs of former comrades of Savarkar in Abhinav Bharat such as Sridhar Raghunath Vartak, Damodar Mahadeo Chandratre and Krishnaji Mahabal added new shades to the emerging picture of this man’s life. A compilation of all this emergent information along with extensive personal interviews with Savarkar himself was accomplished by his confidant Dhananjay Keer. Keer’s biography in English is among the first complete accounts of Savarkar from his birth in Bhagur in 1883 till the time of his death in 1966. It has been hailed by fans and criticized by opponents for being highly eulogistic.

  Within this rubric of several biographies, this book posits itself as one that presents to its readers an objective assessment of Savarkar and his contemporaries based on extensive archival research of original documents from across the world and hitherto unused Marathi documents.

  Savarkar was himself quite philosophical in his approach about why his story needed to be told. In his memoirs that are now compiled in a ten-volume collection, Savarkar Samagra Vangmaya , he begins by thanking the amazing ability that human beings have to forget. But for this, we would have miserable experiences and painful memories of this and past lives haunting us all the time! Past wou
nds can impair present and future paradigms and relationships, he opines. In this fine balance between remembering and letting go, he conjectures that memoirs and autobiographies need to pass a litmus test to ascertain whether they need to be written at all in the first place. Beyond one’s personal self and family, if someone’s story brings to light a conglomeration of several other noteworthy individuals who have shaped the country and her fate, such a story deserves to be recorded. He then asserts that his story is so inextricably linked with that of the nation, its destiny and a narrative of two or three of its generations that he would not wish for them to be burnt away on his pyre. It is with this intent that he sets off to compile his memoirs.

  With so little known about the armed struggle for freedom, given the oppressive alien regime and an uncooperative sovereign rule thereafter, he believes that a narration of his life that brings to light these obscure facts and heroes becomes a national duty. Being the eternal rationalist, Savarkar however cautions, not only himself, but also every future biographer of his. While the temptation to exaggerate and pay encomiums to oneself would be intense in order to win wide public acclaim, he calls for restraint and a conscious detachment with the writing. In his own words: